Many Morris sides will say "after a drink or two we are all right." Now I wonder, I've spoken to individuals about what this means, it usually means that you're so tight when you start the dancing that you need something to loosen you up so that you can dance a bit better.
It's an established scientific fact, believe it or not, that any alcohol degrades performance, so the fact that you get better after a drink or two, means that you start off doing something wrong. I think that what you do is that because the Morris doesn't warm up, doesn't do anything to stretch it's muscles, people start tense and tight in what they're doing. Now, the effect of tension is to tighten all the muscles up and to try to minimise movement by balancing one tension off against another. This, of course, puts you in the position of maximum chance of injury or strain and it's inhibitory. What happens is, if you do nothing about it once you have warmed up, got the blood flowing, the things stretched and so on, you still remain in this tensed up situation and until you've had a drink or two and start to be expansive and extrovert again, you don't sort of open up.
The answer to that is not to have your drink before you start, because I think there's another catch, if you drink before you dance, alcohol has the normal effect it has on human beings, in other words, it just degrades your mental processes. If you actually dance and then drink, for some reason or other, the alcohol just goes straight through. You very seldom see drunken Morris men who danced and then drank, but you often see drunken Morris men who have drunk and then tried to dance.
This business of how you start, very simple stretching. When you realise what the problem is, it's tension, so you've got to relax, you've got to stretch the main muscles in the arms and legs and the back. You've all seen the foreign teams here doing simple exercises out of sight. They're not out for injury, they're out to enjoy themselves and to give a good performance from the first jump.
Funnily enough, in this country, when you suggest to people that they do exercises for warming up, other than athletes, you get laughed at. An American friend of mine, Tony Barron, who's been going around taking films, when he's danced he's automatically done it, mind you he did have a Ph.D. in this sort of field. But when he does it, he gets a lot of derisory remarks and yet he never has injuries and his side never has those sort of problems. What's more, they don't end up stiff at the end of an hours practice either, because they work themselves up properly, whereas Tubby and I are as stiff as hell. We don't practise what we preach well enough, I'm afraid, and for that I do apologise to myself, but I must offer you the advice.
What is the Morris? The Morris is an occasion. I think I've said to you before that when you go round talking to the public, anything that's dressed up performing publicly with organised music and in costume is thought of as Morris, even if you're doing country dances mixed and things like this. The general impression is Morris in the public's mind. Nobody ever tells them what Morris is, so they think of it as an occasion, an event.
So, it behoves on you to think of the show as a totality, which means coming on to dance and leaving at the end of a dance is important. It also means you don't have your post-mortem on what went wrong in front of the public, not unless you're going to choreograph it anyhow.
There are sides, the one that I've met this year that impressed me, Coventry. Their philosophy, as told to me by my second son anyhow, is that you do in practice what you expect to do in public, or vice versa, I'm not quite sure which way. But you do in practice, walk on, walk off, so the habit's there, it doesn't occur to people to have a chat in front of the audience. At the side, yes, but not in front of the public. You have a tidy walk on, people try and avoid the business of five men saying "where are you?" and having to go into the pub and drag somebody out and things like this. It does have an adverse impression on the public, occasionally you can get away with it if you put it over in the right way. In terms of standard, in terms of overall effect and so on I think you need to pay attention to that sort of detail. Being professional, in these days the public is conditioned by professional entertainment, being professional is attention to detail. I know that the definition of amateur by Vaughn Williams was "if it's worth doing at all it's worth doing badly", think about that, he was talking about folk dancers you see, it was so worth doing that they were prepared to do it badly, I don't think we are today. The Morris is worth doing and we ought to do it well and we do it to the limit of our ability.
The next thing I want to say is that a lot of ill feeling gets caused between sides because you dance better than they do. You tend to think "why on earth can't they do as well as we do, why don't they try?" So often, you know, this criticism is made by the person who, the person in the side who hasn't actually pulled the side together. You won't often find the leader of foreman of a good club going up to another club and telling them "you're bloody awful, you ought to do it my way." Usually, you find it's the chap who's been in there two or three years, who goes up and says "you ought to do it my way", meaning the way he's been drilled and taught by the foreman.
Another thing, clubs do have different objectives, some women's sides exist for a Thursday night get together of people who want express themselves in dancing rather than knitting or sewing or whatever other sort of things women do. You've got to accept there are clubs which exist for social reasons and not particularly for the standard of dancing. You can't criticise them for their objectives but you can give them helpful advice if their dancing is not good.
There are many tricks of the trade you know that people miss. Let me show you. One of the - Cotswold Morris in particular - its beauty are the jumps and capers - getting off the ground, springing around. The other thing that's nice about it, is it's got punch, drive in the movements, it's not something which is danced in a sloppy sort of way. Now the way to get drive in the figures, is in fact to make a good strong movement on the first strong beat of movement. If you're standing still and have to rotate the body, then lift the foot, then push off, you go very slowly to start with and there's no drive apparent to the public. If you go into something from a jump, it's very easy if you jump like this - jump and take your feet back about half a foot length, so you're falling forward ready to go into something very easily. The difference between the two makes for drive and no drive. I call it tricks of the trade, it's a simple little point which in itself has only a small effect on the total performance but when applied to all the detail, you tighten up the dance and improve the quality no end. You can often, when you see bad dancing or poor dancing from another side, make a point or two of this sort. You don't have to critical, we are all trying to get good Morris, and I'm sure there are very few sides in the country who don't like advice or who won't accept advice. This is an unfair question. Is there anybody here from a side who wouldn't accept advice? I'm afraid only two hands have gone up, from members of sides who are perfect, Adderbury and Stow.
I have been asked about the general question of repertoire. Many sides have large repertoires, thirty or forty dances, drawn from a large number of traditions. Now, I beg people to think themselves of the traditional repertoire. A traditional side, and we have information from some over two dozen sides, lists of dances that they did, traditional sides had about twenty dances in practice at any one time, including several jigs, fifteen to seventeen dances would represent a traditional repertoire. Where we have knowledge, for Headington and Bampton, for example, or Ascot-under-Wychwood, of dances that had been in the repertoire, there were as many in, as there were dances they didn't do, so at any one time for Bampton, forty odd dances would be known but only half would be in practice. The lesson is that the number you can carry is limited.
Another little trick I learnt from musicians, is that optimum repertoire size is about three times what you can use in any one event. If you're a country dance band and you have as many tunes as you need to run three dances, if you're a Morris team, you need as many dances as you use in three shows. This is a rule of thumb I should say but worth thinking about. The traditional repertoire included jigs as a way of sublimating the enthusiast who otherwise would have had them dancing some obscure dance from some obscure tradition just because he wants to do something special. Also the mixture of dances is limited, in other words there are many more simple dances and a number of corner dances.
One of the problems of picking out from various traditions is that you can use everybody's show dance - Laudanum Bunches, Queen's Delight, Dearest Dicky, Jockey to the Fair. I remember a show in Windsor where it was just like that, even the crowd noticed it was getting rather similar from dance to dance. Make sure you have a balanced show. It's not a bad idea to think of your dances in terms of tunes, shaping etc. and put it together as if you were a bit more professional.
Talking about the size of repertoire, I think 17 to 20 dances - you'd be hard put to go through that at an evening's practice. It's possible, as each dance takes less than three minutes. I know that, I've been filming Morris for a long time. The normal length of a Cotswold Morris dance is 2 minutes. 17 dances done continuously is 34 minutes.
You now want to know why I said you normally take 6-8 minutes per dance to do a show. This leaves you to think how much time you waste in going on and off and talking and drinking and things like this. The average Morris show is funereal in pace really, there's no climax, no excitement about it. You do a dance and pause then, by the grace of God, you show them another dance. A bit more organisation and you could put more into it.
Now the question of different traditions. I remember, many years ago, White Horse decided that doing 35 dances from 13 traditions was a bit unreasonable so they cut their repertoire down to 12 dances from 10 traditions. They did that very well for a few years, then they had a problem when they brought beginners in. While they danced well that was good.
My experience is that the isolated dance from a particular tradition is the most difficult one to keep in practice. People in practice do need a bit of variety going on all the time and if you learn several dances from one tradition you have a chance to practice the fundamentals, the stepping, the figures and things like this without getting bored. My experience is that about 4 is the minimum number to have of any tradition. If you have less than 4 of that style, it isn't what I call a viable tradition as a dance, it's just an isolated dance which you are therefore bound to dance in the club style.
There is a general mish-mash way of doing things in any one club. I know it differs from club to club but all back-to-backs tend to look like every other back to back in a club. So, if you do an isolated dance - your one Ilmington dance, it's surprising how un-Ilmington it becomes. Given a reasonable number of dances, personally I think 4 is a minimum, you can get character into what you do.
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Is anyone from Pilgrim here? Pilgrim, I believe have a rule of changing tradition every two years. Their own experience is that they want to keep the degree of novelty going. Other sides believe that you should have one tradition only. There are positive advantages in dancing one tradition. The first and obvious one is that you need less practice, once you've learned it, that's it. It's easier to get the feel of it if you are doing the same style all the time. I know it's easy to appeal to the tradition and say that the traditional sides only had one sort of dance. It's not so you know. Headington had the funny stepping version, Abingdon had a dance which was completely different - out of style with the others. You can't say the traditional sides only have one style, they may have two.
I said one advantage was to minimise practice, to get a better feel for it, on the whole a higher standard of dancing, up to a point. The point is usually about 3-4 years after you've started into your tradition. One of the things that people don't perhaps appreciate because they're not teachers or professionals in the educational field, is that you learn so much and then there is a learning platform that you get to. Your club sets a standard for beginners and everybody is worked up to that sort of level and then you dance away at that. There's probably about 85 or 90% of what you can extract out of that and you'll feel rather contented. You usually have the crisis point in the club at the 3-4 year point where they say "Ah, well I know it all, why do we practice, why do we bother" etc. Either the leader gets up and goes because he's a bit fed up with it or the side becomes a bit more social and it starts to decline in standard (and I can think of sides of that sort) or they have a flaming row inside the club. This either leads to a split because they don't really understand what the problem is or in the good ones they say "Hey we've got to a certain standard. Now we realise we can do better now we actually have control of our hands and feet and our mind" - that's important as well - so they can get on and work. At the 3-4 year period, when you are what I would call an experienced dancer, that is you know your dances, you can dance in a set with other people and while dancing you can listen to the music and dance to the music.
A beginner is really someone who has trouble all the time. Advanced Morris is what I call it when you have spatial awareness, you can dance with other people. An experienced dancer is someone who can dance not only with others(?) but can dance to the music as well and listen and express himself and has got to the stage of being able to express himself within the framework of what you're trying to do. That's the crisis point where you realise you have to go back to fundamental principles and sometimes re-learn or re-work all you do. How you do the step, how you jump, how you do the hand movements, your attitude to presentation and things like this. The end result may just be a bit of polishing up which converts you from a good run-of-the-mill side (notice I say run-of-the-mill, all the rubbishy sides don't come to my workshops - at least I hope not) to one of the excellent sides. You then get hooked I hope on excellence.
The only reason for having hobbies, and Morris is a hobby - spare time activity. (Your joking, my work is a spare time activity. I have a job that travels the world so that I can see the Morris.) That's all the points I want to make.